Website CMS questions

[Reegan D. Breu]

Hello,

 

This is my first time posting to the forum. Our organization plans to implement a website content management system in 2007. We are a national non-profit organization with under 20 staff.

 

We have decided to explore commercial options rather than open source given our limited in-house technical capacity to work with an open-source product (no programmers on staff). Currently, I am trying to find a listing of the more "tried and true" commercial CMS products with some reviews. I am aware of the CMS Watch Report, but we do not have a sufficient budget to purchase this. 

 

I have several questions that I am hoping you can help me with:

 

1. Can anyone suggest a site that provides a (fairly) comprehensive list of these systems?

 

2. What systems have a longer and more stable track record?

 

3. Are you a smaller organization that has implemented a commercial website CMS? What product did you implement? How has it worked for your organization?

 

In advance, thank you very much for your assistance.

 

Reegan D. Breu

Manager, Information Services

Centre for Indigenous Environmental Resources

www.cier.ca

 

---

Access over 1 million songs - Yahoo! Music Unlimited Try it today.
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[Bob Doyle]

Hi Reegan,

There are many directories of CMS (I have identified a couple of dozen directories and nearly 2000 branded CMS with websites).
See http://www.cmsreview.com > Resources > Directories.

I wrote about this for EContent.
http://www.econtentmag.com/Articles/ArticleReader.aspx?ArticleID=14534

A few of these directories offer product comparisons. At CMS Review, we separate the open-source from the proprietary.  Besides CMS Review, see http://www.cmsmatrix.org.

Be aware that you can get the open-source CMS hosted for you, so you need minimal in-house IT support. See http://www.opensourcecms.com for references.

Hope this helps,

Bob.

Reegan D. Breu wrote:

Hello,

 

This is my first time posting to the forum. Our organization plans to implement a website content management system in 2007. We are a national non-profit organization with under 20 staff.

 

We have decided to explore commercial options rather than open source given our limited in-house technical capacity to work with an open-source product (no programmers on staff). Currently, I am trying to find a listing of the more "tried and true" commercial CMS products with some reviews. I am aware of the CMS Watch Report, but we do not have a sufficient budget to purchase this. 

 

I have several questions that I am hoping you can help me with:

 

1. Can anyone suggest a site that provides a (fairly) comprehensive list of these systems?

 

2. What systems have a longer and more stable track record?

 

3. Are you a smaller organization that has implemented a commercial website CMS? What product did you implement? How has it worked for your organization?

 

In advance, thank you very much for your assistance.

 

Reegan D. Breu

Manager, Information Services

Centre for Indigenous Environmental Resources

www.cier.ca

 

---

Access over 1 million songs - Yahoo! Music Unlimited Try it today.

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[Austin, Darrel]

> We have decided to explore commercial options rather than
> open source given our limited in-house technical capacity to
> work with an open-source product (no programmers on staff).

The only difference between OS and Commercial CMS products is that you
pay more for one up front. ;o)

In otherwords, if you want to maintain these in-house, you're going to
need a programmer regardless of whether or not it is OS or if it is
commercial.

> Currently, I am trying to find a listing of the more "tried
> and true" commercial CMS products with some reviews. I am
> aware of the CMS Watch Report, but we do not have a
> sufficient budget to purchase this.

This is my opinion, but, personally, CMS reviews aren't terribly useful
at all. Most of them that are out there are either high-level
generalizations, or written by the vendor itself.

You really have to use the product to decide if it's right for you. As
such, I typically recommend people try the OS options first. If it
works, great, you've got a CMS up and running without a license fee. If
it doesn't work, great, you've learned what you do/do not want to see in
a CMS and can now better shop for a commercial product.

I'd talk to a few web development firms in your area that specialize in
one or more OS CMS products. They can likely implement a product,
customized to the extend you need it, for likely the same cost as
purchasing a commercial CMS license.

-Darrel

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[Ed Kapuscinski]

I would strongly recommend checking out the CMS Report, while it doesn't go too strongly into nitty-gritty details of development (like the fact that Rhythmyx has man undocumented features, some of which are NOT covered in training), it does give you a good vendor-neutral review of most of the leading commercial offerings.

 

It's available through http://www.cmswatch.com/ .

 

Ed

 

On 10/31/06, Austin, Darrel <Darrel.Austin@...> wrote:

> We have decided to explore commercial options rather than
> open source given our limited in-house technical capacity to
> work with an open-source product (no programmers on staff).

The only difference between OS and Commercial CMS products is that you
pay more for one up front. ;o)

In otherwords, if you want to maintain these in-house, you're going to
need a programmer regardless of whether or not it is OS or if it is
commercial.

> Currently, I am trying to find a listing of the more "tried
> and true" commercial CMS products with some reviews. I am
> aware of the CMS Watch Report, but we do not have a
> sufficient budget to purchase this.

This is my opinion, but, personally, CMS reviews aren't terribly useful
at all. Most of them that are out there are either high-level
generalizations, or written by the vendor itself.

You really have to use the product to decide if it's right for you. As
such, I typically recommend people try the OS options first. If it
works, great, you've got a CMS up and running without a license fee. If
it doesn't work, great, you've learned what you do/do not want to see in
a CMS and can now better shop for a commercial product.

I'd talk to a few web development firms in your area that specialize in
one or more OS CMS products. They can likely implement a product,
customized to the extend you need it, for likely the same cost as
purchasing a commercial CMS license.

-Darrel

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[Steve Williams]

Darrel...am going to resist the temptation to respond to all the blatently inaccurate OS vs Commercial assertions made throughout the email - but one aspect did confuse me;
 
...you start out by 'claiming' that there is no difference between OS and Commercial products (hmmmmm) - but you end by suggesting there is a difference after all - "If it doesn't work, great, you've learned what you do/do not want to see in a CMS and can now better shop for a commercial product."......... of course if you move the word 'better' inbetween 'a' and 'commercial' then in my view the sentence is spot on ;-)

Rgds
Steve
________________________________

From: cms-bounces@... on behalf of Austin, Darrel
Sent: Tue 31/10/2006 14:46
To: cms@...
Subject: Re: [CMS] Website CMS questions



> We have decided to explore commercial options rather than
> open source given our limited in-house technical capacity to
> work with an open-source product (no programmers on staff).

The only difference between OS and Commercial CMS products is that you
pay more for one up front. ;o)

In otherwords, if you want to maintain these in-house, you're going to
need a programmer regardless of whether or not it is OS or if it is
commercial.

> Currently, I am trying to find a listing of the more "tried
> and true" commercial CMS products with some reviews. I am
> aware of the CMS Watch Report, but we do not have a
> sufficient budget to purchase this.

This is my opinion, but, personally, CMS reviews aren't terribly useful
at all. Most of them that are out there are either high-level
generalizations, or written by the vendor itself.

You really have to use the product to decide if it's right for you. As
such, I typically recommend people try the OS options first. If it
works, great, you've got a CMS up and running without a license fee. If
it doesn't work, great, you've learned what you do/do not want to see in
a CMS and can now better shop for a commercial product.

I'd talk to a few web development firms in your area that specialize in
one or more OS CMS products. They can likely implement a product,
customized to the extend you need it, for likely the same cost as
purchasing a commercial CMS license.

-Darrel

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[Austin, Darrel]

> ...you start out by 'claiming' that there is no difference
> between OS and Commercial products (hmmmmm)

Did you have a point to make, Steve? If so, please expand on it.
Otherwise, don't bad-mouth OS products via FUD.

-Darrel

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[Austin, Darrel]

> Darrel...am going to resist the temptation to respond to all
> the blatently inaccurate OS vs Commercial assertions made
> throughout the email - but one aspect did confuse me;

Well, I couldn't resist the temptation myself. So now I gotta rant...

First of all, I'm just me. A lowly customer of CMS products...who's met
a lot of other lowly customer of CMS products.

My biggest gripe with most commercial CMS products we looked at was a
seemingly huge imbalance between their sales staff and their development
staff.

Am I prejudiced? Probably. That happens when consumers get burned. ;o)

Seems to me that one main advantage of OS products is 100% of the effort
goes into the product's development. And there are plenty of
vendors/partners that offer full support for OS products, too, so it's
not like choosing an OS product means you are going at it alone
completely blind.

In the end, I think the best CMS is one built to fit an organizations
specific needs. I understand that that isn't always a viable option from
a time/cost standpoint. In the end, however, I doubt a company is going
to find that they can use a CMS product (OS or commercial) out of the
gate with zero customization.

Again, in the end, this is all MHO. Feel free to disagree...

-Darrel

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[apoorv.durga]

>
> This is my opinion, but, personally, CMS reviews aren't
> terribly useful at all. Most of them that are out there are
> either high-level generalizations, or written by the vendor itself.
>

I guess it depends. Some of the reviews certainly help you arrive at a
shortlist - afterall there are > 2000 products. Once you have the
shortlist, as you have suggested, one can go ahead and try out the
products.


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[Tony Byrne - CMS Watch]

Hi-

 

Ed makes an excellent point about vendor documentation. 

-----Original Message-----
From: cms-bounces@... On Behalf Of Ed Kapuscinski

 

 Rhythmyx has man undocumented features, some of which are NOT covered in training 

 

---------------------------------

 

Here is an excerpt from our report on this issue.

 

Documentation

It’s possible to generalize about the state of documentation of most CMS products in this

report: it’s bad. Among most open source projects and some commercial vendors,

documentation is very, very bad. In general, you should not rely on the vendor’s

documentation to teach, or even explain, or even document adequately, how a system works.

Instead, invest in formal training (for both developers and contributors), and cultivating

relationships with developers at the vendor, as well as other licensees of the product in your

own industry.

Some vendors have acknowledged the difficulty in keeping their support documents up-todate

and have developed various types of knowledgebases to capture and update more

information in a useful, searchable way. Not all knowledgebases are very knowledgeable, but

among some vendors, they are good enough that customers have learned to check there first.

You should request guest access and check it out before you sign any contract.

(p. 93 Ent. Edition)

 

----------------------

 

Cheers!

 

----------------------------------------------
Tony Byrne              Silver Spring, MD  USA
Founder, CMS Watch          V: [phone]

Technology Evaluation Reports
http://www.cmswatch.com/Reports/

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[Austin, Darrel]

> Hi-
>  
> Ed makes an excellent point about vendor documentation.  

To add to that, I'd suggest that you ask if the CMS vendor has
unfiltered user-to-user support forums as well. I was surprised that so
few did when we did out initial research.

-Darrel

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[Ed Kapuscinski]

Yes, user forums would be great things in many cases...

On 10/31/06, Austin, Darrel <Darrel.Austin@...> wrote:

> Hi-
>
> Ed makes an excellent point about vendor documentation.

To add to that, I'd suggest that you ask if the CMS vendor has
unfiltered user-to-user support forums as well. I was surprised that so
few did when we did out initial research.

-Darrel

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[Rickard Öberg-2]

I'll bite.

Austin, Darrel wrote:
> My biggest gripe with most commercial CMS products we looked at was a
> seemingly huge imbalance between their sales staff and their development
> staff.

Our ratio is 1 sales guy and 10 developers.

> Am I prejudiced? Probably. That happens when consumers get burned. ;o)

Prejudiced? Probably, but maybe you have the views you have because the
options you've looked at fit the description you gave.

Does that mean that all fit that description? Of course not.

> Seems to me that one main advantage of OS products is 100% of the effort
> goes into the product's development.

If a customer uses an OS product and pays programmers to do
customization for their needs, 0% is going to go to product development.

If a customer pays an OS product support company to get help, 0% of that
is going to go to product development.

If a company provides support for an OS product, then what is their
incentive to improve the product in such a way that customers do not
need to buy programmer or support hours to use it? To me this is one of
the biggest flaws with the OS business model in general: there's no
incentive for the developers to make it easy to use so that customers
can be independent and self-reliant. If one makes money doing
customizations and installation/configuration, then there is incentive
to *not* make it easy to use.

By comparison, a company using a commercial license (such as myself) and
which wishes to minimize support and customization needs (because we
want to dedicate our hours to develop the product, which we believe is
in the best interest of us and the customers) has a clear incentive to
make it as easy to use as possible.

And this is, in fact, one of the main reasons why our customers find our
product to be way way WAY cheaper than others, including OpenSource
alternatives: because they don't have to spend tons of cash on getting
consultants to make it work and/or maintain it.

> In the end, I think the best CMS is one built to fit an organizations
> specific needs.

Just as having a programming language for each task would be perfect, as
it would be specifically adapted to that particular task. Of course,
you'd have no IDE's, no libraries, no books to help, and there's all
sorts of other things you have to build yourself. But other than that it
would be the best thing to do.

> I understand that that isn't always a viable option from
> a time/cost standpoint. In the end, however, I doubt a company is going
> to find that they can use a CMS product (OS or commercial) out of the
> gate with zero customization.

(I love this part)

80%+ of our customers do zero customization of our CMS product to create
their websites. It's all point and click. Unless you call that
"customization" as well. But there's no coding necessary, and no
creation of stylesheets or such things.

> Again, in the end, this is all MHO. Feel free to disagree...

I'm not so much disagreeing (because from your perspective with your
experience it is quite possibly perfectly true), as much as I'm saying
that what you describe is not necessarily applicable to all tools out
there, ours included.

We use about 70+ OpenSource libraries in our product, so it's not that I
don't like OpenSource. I'm just a little worried that people say that
something is "cheap" because it's "OpenSource". Well, heck, we have cut
our licensing prices by at least an order of magnitude since we can
deliver functionality that is implemented using OpenSource libraries, so
our customers get those warm and fuzzy OpenSource benefits as well!

best,
   Rickard

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[Steve Williams]

Hi Darrel
........the list has thrashed out in the past the differences between OS and Commercial.....and the differences dont change...not intending to re-ignite the topic.....merely point out the logical 'blip' in your argument......but if you want to talk about creating Fear Uncertainty and Doubt ....suggest you read your own email again.......
 
...since you invite me to make my point;
a) you attempt to undermine the value of CMS reviews by suggesting they are written by vendors - not sure where you get your information from to make such asssertions - but it does not reflect my own experience of reviews written by analysts et al - most of them are independant and often contain 'painful' analysis of a products strengths and weaknesses - as a starting point they make very useful 'industry views' as they often take a 'helicopter' view of the market and offer independant perceptions of the way products are evolving. It might not be terribly useful if you are promoting or looking to evaluate an OpenSource solution though - as they do seem to focus on the commercial products - not sure why that is - and of course it would be FUD to offer an opinion - though I can think of a few....
 
b) you suggest that commercial products need as much programming resource as OS ones - comparing which OS to which commercial for one thing ??? good FUD to use your terminology.....but an unhelpful comment unless you are able to be more specific. What does seem to the case is that there are commercial solutions that promote their products on the basis of a large amount of 'out of the box' functionality being available. There are also commercial solutions that resemble more of a 'toolkit' than a solution. I am not an expert in the field of OS solutions - but I am sure there are examples of both 'packaged' OS offerings as well as 'toolkit' OS offerings. The programming input of every product depends on the product - not on it being OpenSource or Commercial....
 
c) finally you suggest that OS solutions are the equal of commercial ones.......if that were really really true - and there was no value offered by a commercial package that was not contained within an OS one........id est they were truly equal (again what are we comparing here ?!? OS WCMS to Commercial ECMS ?!?) - then there would be no commercial vendors for WCMS, DMS, ECMS - or any software product come to think of it......and the world would be using OpenSource solutions for everything.........(hmmmmm)
Rgds
Steve
 
________________________________

From: cms-bounces@... on behalf of Austin, Darrel
Sent: Tue 31/10/2006 15:52
To: cms@...
Subject: Re: [CMS] Website CMS questions



> ...you start out by 'claiming' that there is no difference
> between OS and Commercial products (hmmmmm)

Did you have a point to make, Steve? If so, please expand on it.
Otherwise, don't bad-mouth OS products via FUD.

-Darrel

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[Austin, Darrel]

> To me this is one of the biggest flaws with the OS
> business model in general: there's no incentive for the
> developers to make it easy to use so that customers can be
> independent and self-reliant.

This statement can be easily spun in the opposite direction:

There's no incentive for commercial CMS vendors to make their products
easy to use so that the customers can be independent and self-reliant as
that takes away from their lucrative annual 'maintenance and support'
contracts.

In the end, make a good product. That's all that matters. Whether it's
OS or not is less of an issue than the quality of the product. I find OS
a bit more approachable as it's a more transparent relationship, IMHO.

> 80%+ of our customers do zero customization of our CMS
> product to create their websites. It's all point and click.

You might be absolutely right...I haven't used your product. That said,
every time I see the 'point and click' statement in software sales
literature I become a bit suspect. More often than not, it's anything
but 'point and click'. Or, it may be point and click, but
technically/more accurately it's: point and click and point and click
and point and click and point and click and point and click and point
and click and test. Oh, you want it to work THAT way? Well,
simple...just tap into our API and write your own module. ;o)

> I'm not so much disagreeing (because from your perspective
> with your experience it is quite possibly perfectly true), as
> much as I'm saying that what you describe is not necessarily
> applicable to all tools out there, ours included.

That's fair. Again, I've just been speaking from my own perspective and
from that of other's I've dealt with.

> We use about 70+ OpenSource libraries in our product, so it's
> not that I don't like OpenSource. I'm just a little worried
> that people say that something is "cheap" because it's
> "OpenSource".

Well, hold on...I never meant to imply it's 'cheap'. No matter the
product, it costs money to maintain, train, customize and deploy. No
argument there. With a CMS, my guess is that one's expense is going to
be moreso with internal staff getting them able to maintain content than
with any specific technology (depending on the org, of course).

I don't think it's ever fair to say OS is cheaper than Commercial or
vice versa by default. There are so many 'it depends' involved.

My recommendation is based solely on the 'try it out' phase. You can try
OS software without too much long-term commitment. A lot of commercial
software has that overhead of the initial licensing cost. I've seen a
lot of 'enterprise software' in use not because it's good, but because
'well, we paid for it'.

I got a few replies stating that not everyone has the money/time for the
'try it out' phase. I find that absurd. When shopping for software, it's
really hard to come up with a proper list of needs until one actually
gets to experience the product. No amount of planning can replace some
hands on interaction with the product.

I'd never buy a vehicle without taking it for a test drive, yet I see
companies purchasing software all the time and then dumping it in the
hands of IT and end-users.

Now, if any of you are a commercial CMS company that makes a quality
product, sells it at a fair price, offers plenty of support and
peer-to-peer channels for said support, then feel free to ignore all of
my ranting. ;o)

-Darrel

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[Rickard Öberg-2]

Austin, Darrel wrote:
> This statement can be easily spun in the opposite direction:
>
> There's no incentive for commercial CMS vendors to make their products
> easy to use so that the customers can be independent and self-reliant as
> that takes away from their lucrative annual 'maintenance and support'
> contracts.

Not at all. All customers will want "maintenance" in order to get bug
fixes and new features even if the product is easy to use. Those things
are unrelated. As for support, again, we prefer to spend our time doing
development instead of support, so making it work and easy to use is in
our best interest. We have a fixed support fee, so the less they call,
the better. How do you get people to call us less? By having the product
be easy to use, bug-free